“Go then.” The agent angled his head toward the area of the docks that extended to the marina, then the mainland. “If you’re apprehended by la polizia and they find you haven’t applied for a new passport, your stay in Italy will be indefinitely extended.”
“Grazie.”
“And keep a close eye on this one.”
He ushered Avyi away, with his hand at her lower back. They hired a porter to assist with the baggage. Soon they were seated in a rented town car, with a driver whisking them overland toward Florence.
She glanced at Mal, a cheeky bit of side-eye. “You didn’t listen to the nice man. I see no consulate.”
“And you won’t. No papers, ever, at all, means you have no consulate. You’re a woman without country.”
“So I’m Greek by default, as your wife?” Her brows were so expressive that the rest of her features couldn’t keep up.
“You understood that?”
“Some.”
He watched her for clues, indications, but she only aimed that blankness at him. “How long until we arrive in Florence?”
“About three hours,” he said. “Might as well get some sleep.”
“It’s two in the afternoon.”
“Yes, but we were both up at all hours.”
“Yes, we were.”
Mal was left pressing his lips tight. So casually, Avyi tossed him that comment before leaning against the window. She didn’t sleep, but she didn’t move either. She simply watched, as she had during the helicopter flight. He picked near-invisible flecks off his trousers and adjusted the creases. This was his skin. The clothing that defined him. Yet he almost missed the freedom of jeans and a T-shirt.
“Was last night your prediction?”
“No,” she said simply. “In what I’ve seen, we’re surrounded by white.”
Mal hovered between satisfaction and surprise, between greed and knowing the road they traveled together would not be tidy. It would never fit his former life of private jets and Armani suits packed for him by an on-call valet from his own clan.
Maybe that was for the best.
He’d left his life in the care of others for too long.
Staring at her profile, he was hit again by her unexpected beauty. She had cleaned up nicely for their entrance into Italy. But could no one else see the wildness bubbling beneath the surface of her forced calm? Of course not. She’d had years to become the Pet. Only Mal knew Avyi. And Dragon damn, he wanted to know even more about her.
“What we did was reckless,” he said. “You were asking for trouble.”
“You answered.”
Mal turned in his seat and forced her to meet his gaze. Soon their faces were close enough that he could’ve kissed her again. He practically tasted her sweet breath. She tasted sweet everywhere. “You were a virgin.”
“And now I’m not. Thank you.” She smiled softly, with cheeks tinted pink. “Although I’d never known what I wanted, last night was it.”
He accepted her compliment on a bone-deep level, but his confusion remained. He needed to say what was on his mind while she was still in the mood to speak. “You slept in Dr. Aster’s room. He brainwashed you. You followed him everywhere—collared and leashed by his side. But he never touched you?”
“He touched me, but not that way. I was his trophy. Every man’s deepest desire, but otherwise innocent. I think he liked the contrast.”
Mal took hold of the back of her neck. She flinched. “You’ll have to be stronger than flinching if you want to keep playing these games.”
“Is this play? It feels like walking on the ledge at the top of a skyscraper.”
“That, too.”
She kissed his cheek with a teasing smile. At least he’d broken through the ice of her facade as the Pet. “So last night won’t be a one-time encounter.”
“A prediction?”
“An absolute fact.” She smiled. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Mal decided to start right there. He clasped her chin and urged her to meet him midway. At first, their kiss was almost polite. Two strangers. But the swell of passion they’d shared was quick to follow. He swept her hair back from her face and held her head, taking command. With a few strokes of eager tongues and a playful war between teeth and lips, he was burning again. She breathed faster and clutched his lapels. Heedless of the driver, Mal swept his hand over her breast and fondled that small, soft swell.
He couldn’t remember why they were in that limo, or why they were even in Italy. He only knew that he wanted to lay Avyi back against the lush leather seat and find his way inside her again.
She came back to herself far more quickly than he would’ve liked. Her petite hand pressed against his chest, and she pulled away as much as his encircling arms would allow. “We have a lot to discuss. Much to my disappointment, Giva, it has nothing to do with our sex life.”
After a deep breath, he nodded. He planted a last kiss on her passion-swollen lips before releasing her. At least she didn’t return to staring blankly out the car window.
“Blending is not your skill,” she said. “No offense. It’s not one of mine either.”
“I’d argue otherwise. Is the look you gave the customs official what you gave Dr. Aster when he expected obedience?”
“I suppose. I’ve never thought of it. Most times he didn’t want an opinion. He wanted a mirror that said he was right.” She paused, staring at Mal with her unnerving capacity for directness. “Do you expect a mirror?”
“No.”
“Are you certain?”
He began to protest, but stopped himself to consider. “No, I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I like being right.”
“Do you expect failure when we reach Florence? That I won’t find anything of value to either of us?”
She knew Pollakioh’s name. How? Where is she leading me?
A chill bristled the hair under his shirtsleeves.
“I don’t expect to find anything,” he said stiffly. “So, yes, I expect failure.”
She pulled her lips into her mouth, eyes averted. That cold distance was back. She could raise it like an umbrella against the rain. “Perhaps I should continue on my own when we reach Florence, but you won’t let that happen.”
“I’m not in Italy for the sights.”
“You have an assassination plot to unravel—which has nothing to do with me, you’ll learn. But if the cartels are behind it, especially the Asters, and they know I’m with you …” She shook her head. “He’ll find me.”
Mal was more disturbed by his gut reaction to parting from this woman. “He can’t simply find you. He’s not a telepath.”
“He had a thrice-cursed Indranan at his command, named Ulia. She was responsible for brainwashing your cousin for two months down in the Cages. If anyone can find me, she can.” She kicked off her pumps and pulled her stocking-clad feet up to hug her knees. “You don’t want me to be your weakness. I don’t want you to be mine.”
*
Mal didn’t say anything, which gave Avyi the impression that he agreed with her assessment.
They would make love again. She knew that much. Sometimes her strongest predictions came about by means that would seem, by all logic, to be counterintuitive. They would go their separate ways after they reached Florence, but circumstances would play out as she predicted. She knew that, just as she knew she would see Dr. Aster again. Inevitably. Her future and his, twined, interlaced like the boughs of trees planted too closely. She much preferred sharing that connection with Malnefoley, yet fate was a strange ocean tipped with cold waves.
“I’ll assume, for the moment,” Mal said, “that you’re innocent. Somewhat deluded, but innocent of any crime against me.”
“How gracious.”
“Do you believe there is any connection between your search for Cadmin and the attempt on my life?” Unconsciously, perhaps, he rubbed his shoulder where the impeccable suit hid the last stages of his healing. “Tell me that.”
She turned so that her feet occupied the space between their seats. The town car was plush with leather and wood-grain decor. She’d traveled in such vehicles when Dr. Aster took her to Grievances in other countries—those hosted by the Kawashimas in Hong Kong, the Townsends in London. Only, despite years and years after having had her in his possession, he still handcuffed her to the door, with collar and leash around her neck.
Avyi rubbed her throat, feeling the ghostly shadow of that leather and all the years she’d borne its subtle weight against her skin.
“When you ask, ‘Do you believe … ?’ are you asking me to use logic or my gift? What if I revealed a prediction you couldn’t understand or immediately quantify?”
“I maintain the right to reserve judgment.”
The Italian clime was just as generous with its sunshine across his straw-blond hair as Crete had been. The light cast from overhead caught the fringe of his golden lashes and stripped the vigorous blue from his eyes. The color was icy now, but his intensity made the color somehow casual. He was practically basking in the beatific weather. The effect was powerful, radiating through Avyi’s limbs until her heart filled painfully. She had to look away, or else she’d return to places of memory that were solidly in the past. Mal in blue jeans, sitting on the back step of a dingy hostel. Mal stretched beneath her in their berth. Mal looking her up and down on the docks of Florence, casually claiming her as his wife.
“You think you know so much,” she said quietly.
“I know nothing, which is why I’m asking you—”
“A charlatan.”
“—for answers.” He cracked his thumb knuckles, then yanked at his tie. The silk and a few buttons fell away. “I’m tired of this lonayíp thing.”
“You act like a human … what do they call them? Playboys? All money and privilege. You lead because it was expected of you, not like the Sun in India. That woman feels a call to service—an obligation to make life better for her Indranan brethren. You don’t want the responsibility, but you’re stuck.”
“I’m Giva,” he said, as if declaring he was a leper.
“There’s no returning it when the children give you that title, even if they were quiet and few.” She smoothed her hands down her luscious wool trousers. She’d never worn a garment so exquisite. “But have you ever considered the obvious?”
He glared at her, one hand pressed to his brow as if holding back a headache. “Which is?”
“The Dragon doesn’t call on the weak. He doesn’t call upon the feeble to take mantles of power. I don’t like my gift any more than you do, but I try to understand it. I try to accept what it means for us as individuals.”
“If your power is real, that means we live without free will.”
“I would be a saner person if I could fully accept that.”
“I am my own person,” he said too loudly for the confined backseat of the town car. “I will not give up on that. Your insistence means decisions are a farce.”
“No matter what you and I do when we reach Florence, we will wind up tangled in bed together, naked and satiated. And at some point, you will stand in shadow beneath the Duomo. How to come to peace with that is the hard part. To me … it’s fact now.”
“Let’s make it fact then.” His temper was burning brighter by the second. “We’ll fuck again. We’ll do it in the first hotel we find in Florence and be done with it. I’d rather track down Dr. Aster and fry him to dust one cell at a time than need to rely on you for answers.”
“Do you believe in the Dragon?”
Avyi was so surprised by the heretical nature of her question that she shrank back from the Giva. He shimmered with electricity that emanated from the tips of his hair and the delicate whorls of each fingerprint.
“You forget yourself, Avyi. And you forget who I am.”
“Oh, I could never forget that. You bask in it like a tragedian on center stage, relishing the best soliloquy ever written. You wear your title with such disdain. And your wealth. Yet what do you know of sacrifice and suffering? What do you know of getting your hands dirty?”
He snatched out from across the seats and grabbed her wrist. “You forget yourself. And you have no idea how dirty my hands have been. Tell that to the Dragon when you see him flying around the future somewhere.”
With one shove, he pushed her back against her window and retreated to his half of the rear seat. She rubbed her wrist. “You don’t,” she said, voice rasping. “You don’t believe.”
He shot her a murderous look.
“No wonder you hate your responsibility so much. It would be like Catholics making an atheist the pope.” Avyi slipped her pumps back on and crossed her legs. She wasn’t hiding from this man anymore. He wasn’t the doctor, who threatened her so regularly with his very presence that she felt like a woman half her height. “So will you believe me when I say that, yes, I see our paths connected? Of course you won’t. But we’ll part as soon as those obligations to the future are satisfied.”
“We fought, survived an assassination attempt, pushed past a screaming nightmare, and had a few memorable hours. That’s been plenty.”
“You’re not even curious to see how it unfolds?”
“Frankly, my only interest now is to see you discredited. Then I’ll have no problem abandoning this little wild-goose chase of ours and—”
“—and handing over responsibility to someone else. Tell me, Giva, what will you do about the Grievance? Will you let it happen again? Will you let Dragon Kings kill each other for the cartels’ sport? Of course not. You’re in charge. You wouldn’t stand for that violence again, not when the key to conception is supposedly such a priority.”
Mal was silent for a long while. His jaw muscles were bunched to match the fists poised so tensely on his knees.
Avyi crossed her arms and looked down at them. It wasn’t cringing into a ball, but she still felt incredibly defensive. Mal was busily righting his appearance as the traffic slowed on their way into the city.
“How can you be so blind,” she asked into the silence, “and discount all the possibilities that don’t fit with your beliefs? Human beings would do the same to us. You of all people should be able to take the impossible and believe it possible.”
Malnefoley of Tigony, the Honorable Giva, turned to her with the full weight and bearing of his title. “Go on, then. What does your mysterious, grown-up fetus of a Cage warrior have to do with the attempt on my life? Tell me, Avyi.”
He’d given her that name. She would always hold him close in her heart for that simple fact. Suddenly their fight seemed like a pair of cats in a cinch-tied bag, squabbling over who knew the way out. They’d shared a very intimate act last night, more than she could process with rational thought. And now he used her name.
“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Now you hear me. I don’t believe it. I certainly don’t like the idea of it. But if this is your … gift … Dragon damn, does it really matter? After all, who’d believe what I can do with mine?”
“Yours is in the seeing. Mine is in the seeing, too, but sometimes it doesn’t come true for years. Or on occasion, the future is cut short. I see that it’s real. The dead don’t.”
“Are you saying I’m going to die?”
“One day you will. What was her name? Pollakioh?”
“Stop.”
“For now, Cadmin’s bow is the next cresting wave.” She found the strength to meet his gaze, although it had the potential to remain angered and irrational. Talking about the Dragon had been an unexpected sore spot that left as many questions as answers. “Random predictions and glimpses are one thing. This has significance, like when I found her arrows. Mal, I’m scared of what I’ll learn.”
“You started calling me that when you had your nightmare.”
“It’s fitting that we be on a first-name basis considering what happened last night.” Her cheeks heated. “And how, according to the Italian port authority, I’m your wife.”
>
A soft smile shaped his lips, slowly easing him back to the man she hoped he was—or could become. “I’ll be with you, Avyi, when you find that bow.”
“You believe that?”
“I was determined to take you back to Greece and wrench the answers out of you. Now I’m in Italy.” He kissed her wrist, where he’d grabbed her with such force. “You have me so turned around, but I’ve never felt more in control of my own decisions. How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. But if I ever meet the Dragon, I’ll ask.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Mal had never been to Florence. He’d been to some of the highest reaches of the Himalayas, and to clan strongholds on the outskirts of Cairo and in the Highlands of Scotland. After his retreat from the outside world following the terror he’d inflicted at Bakkhos, he hadn’t seen the point of travel beyond his explicit duties. He was the leader of Clan Tigony following his grandfather’s death—his grandfather’s execution, to be precise—which meant staying home in the Grecian mountains and the glittering Aegean Sea.
To travel for pleasure? He was a man of significant means, but the thought had rarely occurred to him. Too much responsibility. Too many reasons and resources to command from a distance. So, much to his embarrassment, he found himself gaping like a tourist at the scene laid before him.
They stowed the quality garments in the train station locker, where Mal was pleased to find its content in order. They changed into more casual clothes. Avyi was back in cargos and a gauzy blouse, while Mal took to jeans and a T-shirt again, as if reliving a comforting memory, and donned a black leather jacket. With brass knuckles and her switchblade stowed in a secret compartment in the sole of her boots, Avyi appeared at ease for the first time since leaving the town car behind.
Mal shouldered their pack as they walked to where travel by car was blocked to any vehicles other than those owned by locals. Every subsequent step in their journey to the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, simply called the Duomo because of its unmistakable dome, was literally by foot. They followed the Via dei Calzaiuoli toward the cathedral, which was visible from miles off. Monochrome tiles of green and sienna decorated its facade. What had to be millions of bricks made up the eight-sided dome.
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